The heart of a computer's long term memory is an assembly that is referred to as a magnetic disk drive. The magnetic disk drive includes a rotating magnetic media (disk), write and read heads that are suspended by a suspension arm adjacent to a surface of the rotating magnetic disk and an actuator that swings the suspension arm to place the read and write heads over selected circular tracks on the rotating disk. The read and write heads are directly located on a slider that has an air bearing surface (ABS). The suspension arm biases the slider into contact with the surface of the disk when the disk is not rotating but, when the disk rotates, air is swirled by the rotating disk. When the slider rides on the air bearing, the write and read heads are employed for writing magnetic impressions to and reading magnetic impressions from the rotating disk. The read and write heads are connected to processing circuitry that operates according to a computer program to implement the writing and reading functions.
Patterned magnetic recording media have been proposed to increase the bit density in magnetic recording data storage, such as hard disk drives. In magnetic patterned media, the magnetic material is patterned into small magnetically isolated blocks or islands such that there is a single magnetic domain in each island or “bit”. The single magnetic domains can be a single grain or consist of a few strongly coupled grains that switch magnetic states in concert as a single magnetic volume. This is in contrast to conventional continuous media wherein a single “bit” may have multiple magnetic domains separated by domain walls. U.S. Pat. No. 5,820,769 is representative of various types of patterned media and their methods of fabrication. A description of magnetic recording systems with patterned media and their associated challenges is presented by R. L. White et al., “Patterned Media: A Viable Route to 50 Gbit/in2 and Up for Magnetic Recording”, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 33, No. 1, Jan. 1997, 990-995.
Current plans for production of patterned media include creating a “gold” master disk at high cost and expense. From the “gold” master disk, several “silver” production masters are created. Lastly, production disks that are used in hard disk drives are created from the “silver” disks. However, the production disks in turn could also be used in a process to create additional production disks. What is needed is a method of watermarking the pattern on the patterned media to alert a producer when their production disks are used to create unauthorized additional production disks.